VMware, a Falling Giant?

New submitter Lashat writes "According to Ars Technica, 'A new survey seems to show that VMware's iron grip on the enterprise virtualization market is loosening, with 38 percent of businesses planning to switch vendors within the next year due to licensing models and the robustness of competing hypervisors.' What do IT-savvy Slashdotters have to say about moving away from one of the more stable and feature rich VM architectures available?"

Comments

Re:Microsoft Virtual PC

[motd2k]

Chalk / Cheese? Virtual PC is positioned no where near VMWare - try HyperVM/Xen/KVM

I ca see why

[liquidweaver]

We use OpenNebula/KVM here.
Both are free as in speech, I can do live migration, it's easy to manage, etc.
I'm running the whole thing on an NFS share from an AoE storage backend.
100% libre software solution, and it kicks ass.

Good luck vmware.

Re:I ca see why

[Atriqus]

The point he's trying to make is that no IT person has ever solved a problem that has occurred during a deployment. The only way anything ever gets put into production is specifically by paying someone to walk them through it over a landline phone.

FUDspeak aside, I would imagine they would go here to ask for help.

Re:I ca see why

[liquidweaver]

I'd imagine they could call anyone on our team, including myself. We know the code intimately at this point, and have put it through extensive testing.
This is more of a problem in the proprietary wold - there is a certain point that when something doesn't work you are forced to call for support because the logs only say so much. If you can trace the software and have access to the source, you honestly don't need to call anyone. At that point, it's just a matter of your own determination and the skill set of your team.

As an aside, we did not have to address P2V migration, because this was part of a new product offering. We are considering replacing our internal infrastructure with this, but that's probably going to happen gradually over time. We have very few windows servers left, and I'm frankly considering phasing them out so we don't have to go through the hassle of activation and the big problem Windows has with changing hardware.

Re:I ca see why

[swb]

Calling MS is expensive?

I'd eagerly agree its often frustrating, but AFAIK, a support ticket is only $350 for something like Exchange and they will work the ticket 24/7 until its fixed.

I've even had refunds when they couldn't fix it or for fixes that couldn't be implemented for reasons outside their control.

I had one client use Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 for Exchange 2007. Not the R2 version, but the R1 version (which isn't called R1, but...). A disk went full, the system blue screened and something in IIS was fucked and required a re-install per an MS support call. The client couldn't produce the media and neither could I -- Exchange 2007 was released after 2003 R2 and nobody I've ever seen used the R1 x64 version for anything -- it wasn't even media I could download from what I could see on VLSC.

Needless to say, we did an emergency upgrade on a new VM to 2010 and migrated mailboxes because the downtime waiting for media would have been too great. MS ended up refunding the charge because they didn't fix the issue, despite the fact that the paying customer was the real problem.

Now, I thought that the 5 hours I spent on the phone was excessive for the troubleshooting work that was done (a lot of steps repeated to failure needlessly, and a lot of time spent on hold "researching..."), so it wasn't overall a great experience, but it ended up being free and even if it wasn't, it would have been worth the $350.

VMware is obsolete technology

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all let me say VMware makes one rock solid hypervisor. Out of all of the hypervisors I have used theirs is the least prone to issues.

VMware has a couple of really BIG problems in their platform.

1. Their management tools are windows centric and so is Virtual Center for that matter
2. Their licensing model is confusing as hell and requires a spreadsheet to figure out what you need without overpaying
3. They have so many products that it gets downright confusing to determine which one works for your purpose.
4. They use "old school" sales tactics that just don't work for more modern companies.

When I am engineering a solution and have a problem to solve I am presented with many challenges to present VMware as a solution. Finding the product that suits our needs, Figuring out what license would suit our needs, getting a quote from the vendor without a lot of harassment after the fact trying to close the sale. Rather than deal with all of that many people have found that the open source projects like KVM and XEN are good enough for their needs. Not to mention the huge numbers of free cloud products such as Openstack that gives you enterprise features "for free". At the end of the day I don't care what product get's used as long as the problem is solved with the minimal amount of budget and effort.

A small startup does not want to deal with legacy software and maintaining licensing and dealing with windows boxes. They do great with the "enterprisey" douchebags with their complex setups that cause more outages than they solve but lean and small companies don't want their stuff.

The reality here is the world is slowly changing. Big monolitic companies are failing because their business models are unsustainable without cheating and people are getting fed up with the cheating. VMware has to answer a question to themselves. Do I want to serve the needs of the dying dinosaur companies or do I want to be in business in 10 years?

Re:VMware is obsolete technology

[sexconker]

VMware has a couple of really BIG problems in their platform.

1. Their management tools are windows centric and so is Virtual Center for that matter
2. Their licensing model is confusing as hell and requires a spreadsheet to figure out what you need without overpaying
3. They have so many products that it gets downright confusing to determine which one works for your purpose.
4. They use "old school" sales tactics that just don't work for more modern companies.

Your first point is slowly becoming less of an issue. With vSphere 5 you can now run a Linux appliance for Virtual Center which will do for starters, and it doesn't even require (or support) an external database. Hopefully this will expand to be the only way to get VC, but they'll expand it to use a DB when you get big enough, and make plugins work with it. There's also supposed to be a '75%' web client, e.g. good enough for 75% of tasks and a full web client in the next major update, (5.5?) That's how VMView has been for at least the last major release too, the previous might have been web too, I can't remember.

They have a lot of products because they do a lot of things... regular old server virtualization, enterprise grade server virtualization with HA, desktop (I want a test box), desktop (VDI), disaster recovery (with a replicating san), disaster recovery (without a replicating SAN)... If you don't know what you want to do, looking at their product sheet won't help you any.

I'll give you that vRAM is evil and sales people are douches, but isn't that one a given?

I defy you to go to VMware's website and tell me what the current version of ESXi is, what the free license includes, what the cost is for an academic institution that wants the cheapest licensed version, what features that includes - with specific descriptions, not just names and vague "Enable more robust blah blah" horseshit, and what exactly you would need to download.

The site is intentionally a mess in order to trick people into buying more than they need. It also makes getting updates and changelogs near impossible because you never know what version of what shittily-named product you have. They recently went to ESXi 5, and there was a press release that touted hundreds of new features, and explained about 5 of them in the vaguest detail possible. There are links to various pages on their site to learn more about the hundreds of other new features, but that information simply doesn't exist. All you can get is the shitty presser.

And look at this fucking 10 page topic on "Is there a free version of ESXi 5?". http://communities.vmware.com/thread/320883

The short answer is "Yes, just install it with no license.", but the real answer is there is no fucking specific license for a free version, so there is no guarantee it will remain an option, or that anupdate won't break it, or that your trial license won't be invalidated at some point, or that features won't be turned off for no reason as they did when going from ESX 3 to ESX 4 / ESXi 4.

VMware is fast approaching IBM and Cisco levels of intentional ambiguity. All they need is a shitty "brand awareness" marketing campaign that doesn't feature a product or service, but shows school kids in china teleconferencing with school kids in the US, with no lag, in the middle of the day at both locations.

VirtualBox? VirtualPC?

[Joehonkie]

The number of people talking about VirtualBox and VirtualPC in this thread is astounding. We're talking about "enterprise" virtualization here, not keeping some dev boxes on your desktop. I think you need to be talking about Hyper-V and Xen, as well as all the competing VDI solutions.

Re:Virtualbox was always my favorite

[Desler]

Expensive, bloated and chock full of unnecessary middleware and abstraction layers? That's usually what "enterprise software" means.

Re:Virtualbox was always my favorite

[Znork]

Enterprise Solution - Solvent used for dissolving piles of cash in corporate vaults.

Re:Not soon

[sarhjinian]

+1. Million.

EMC/VMware got greedy with the licensing for v5 and anyone who used some the nicer features (vRAM oversubscription) could potentially find themselves paying a lot.

The drastic limit applied to vRAM in the lower tier editions of ESXi 5 smacks of greed. They might not get caught on this now, but it was bald-faced enough to make people think about going to v5 and to evaluate HyperV instead. I might add that HyperV looks a lot more attractive since MS gives away Windows guests licenses that you'd otherwise pay for with VMware. If you virtualize a lot of Windows servers, going to HyperV could save you huge dollars, whereas vSphere 5 will cost you more.

Consider NetWare: It was a better directory/file/print server than NT, but Microsoft made a compelling argument that NT4 and, eventually, Win2K were good enough that it was worth losing some features, especially if it meant cutting down on the number of platforms and boxes to manage. The pitch for HyperV is very, very similar.

HyperV might not be so hot now, but VMware can't get complacent. Now is the time to put the boots to HyperV, not cede market to it.